Frontrunner Grace Poe is usually well briefed by her panel of expert advisers. But the second debate revealed she needs a little more polish on how to respond to the China question. Not that there is a really good answer to how to respond to the regional bully, but a future president must show savvy that can elicit respect here and abroad.
with deepest thanks to his children
ricky, steve, patty, eddie, and rina (victoria :)
for sharing their dad with nation.
back in 1965 when the brilliant lawyer jovito salonga first ran for the senate, my parents campaigned for him like mad. not only was jovy’s wife lydia the sister of salvador “badong” busuego, a very close friend of theirs since UST medical school in the ’30s (the same batch as eva macaraeg macapagal, who would speak only in spanish with my mother), but salonga had also impressed them as a nationalist and followed news of his stint as congressman of rizal province in 1961 when he chaired the committee on good government, holding inquiries on graft & corruption in aid of legislation, and trouncing dynasties to boot. my parents were always politically engaged and, in the time of marcos, were ardent supporters of salonga and the liberal party, and then also of ninoy (who first ran for the senate in ’67).
i wasn’t into politics yet, not even during my years in UP diliman when it was the hotbed of kabataang makabayan (KM) activism. fresh from convent school, and forewarned about “communists,” i took a while to figure out, listening to rallies happening on the AS steps, what the “ibagsaks” were all about, and yes naman! no to imperialism and feudalism, and no to US bases! but meanwhile i had met and was barkada for a while with the salonga sibs steve and patty who weren’t into politics either — our group used to hang around francis lumen’s VW van (hypo, we called it) under the trees across (but far from) the AS steps, and i remember the music best of all, steve playing guitar and singing the protest songs of dylan and baez, peter paul and mary, with patty singing second voice, what a high. and the times they were a-changing indeed, on so many fronts.
except that, as it turned out, the changes shaping up were for the worse. fast forward to the first quarter storm of jan 1970 by which time marcos had been re-elected amidst cheating allegations and youth org KM had morphed into a new communist party led by joma sison that was increasingly radical, bent on destabilizing, and toppling, the fascist and corrupt marcos government. came plaza miranda, the bombing, in august 1971, that killed nine and injured more than a hundred, among them the leading lights of the liberal party, including senator salonga who was the most gravely hit but who, against all odds, lived to continue the fight and with ninoy kept the opposition alive here at home and in america all through martial law, AND when freedom was won, investigated and became convinced that it was joma sison who ordered the plaza miranda bombing that played right into marcos’s hand, gave him grounds to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, crack down on the radical left, and eventually declare martial law.
during that dark reign of greed and terror, every time senator salonga’s name would come up in the news in connection with anti-marcos events and/or elements, my parents would remind each other about packing a bag just in case they were picked up by the military; they were certain they were on a list of staunch jovy salonga and ninoy aquino supporters. and like many others in the opposition, they started breathing easy again only after the glorious, if fleeting, triumph that was EDSA.
for a while there, things were looking up for nation and for salonga. after a year as chair of the pcgg, laying the legal groundwork for the recovery of ill-gotten wealth, salonga ran again for the senate and, as in ’65 and ’71, topped the race. as expected, he was elected senate president — no one deserved the distinction more. and a lesser mortal would have been inadequate to the heroic task of presiding over a split senate, withstanding intense pressure from cory and america, and casting the deciding vote that spelled the end of US bases – another fleeting triumph — never mind that it doomed, too, his run for the presidency. read randy david’s Salonga and the Senate that said no.
Salonga’s acute sense of history kept him focused on what he felt he needed to do. He set aside all personal considerations—something that, in our culture, was hard to do without appearing rude and arrogant. But, the closing of the American bases in the Philippines took precedence over everything. It was to him a necessary condition for our emergence as a fully sovereign nation—something we needed to do for the sake of future generations, even if it meant displeasing an important and powerful ally.
He was painfully aware that his active opposition to the treaty would adversely affect his political plans. The presidential election of 1992 was just around the corner. Many influential leaders and businessmen who had supported him in his long political career and wished to see him succeed Cory, warned him against playing an assertive role on the issue. But Salonga would not be deterred. For him, the time had come to close this colonial chapter of our history, and it fell on him to lead the Senate to that final moment.
papa didn’t live to see the bases kicked out. when senator salonga ran for president in 1992, mama and i rooted for him, even getting into arguments with family and friends who agreed with anti-salonga propaganda that he was too old, even disabled, or that harked back to allegations of questionable deals with marcos cronies when he led the pcgg. i had a sinking feeling that america, along with our very own amboys, had drawn a line, anyone but salonga. but maybe that’s just me. read randy david’s Jovito Salonga, the scholar-politician.
… in the 1992 presidential election, President Cory was torn between two loyal allies who both wanted to be president—Speaker Ramon Mitra Jr. and Defense Secretary Fidel V. Ramos. Endorsing Jovy Salonga was out of the question. The Americans could not forgive him for the humiliation he had dealt them on the bases question. Big business did not like him for the uncompromising stance he had taken against US interests. Like Diokno, he was the best president we could not have.
I had the privilege of moderating the 1992 presidential debate for the Commission on Elections and television station Channel 5. Blind in one eye, his right hand a deformed mass of skin and bones, the 72-year-old statesman beamed like a professor conducting a graduate class. He was the most erudite and most accomplished person in that pack. Speaking in a measured tone in fluent Filipino and English, he never switched from one code to the other to complete a thought.
But, beside the most prominent pre-martial law politicians, there were other stars in that room that had captured the imagination of a fickle public. One of them was the feisty and outspoken Miriam Defensor Santiago, a former judge, Cabinet member, and immigration commissioner. The other was businessman Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, who had fled the country with the Marcos family in 1986. The broad support that this soft-spoken Marcos crony was getting during the campaign, just six years after the overthrow of the dictatorship, showed that the political winds were ominously shifting.
senator salonga ranked 6th in a race of 7, bested by fvr, miriam, danding, mitra, and imelda, and besting only doy laurel. yes, danding and imelda, back so soon to reclaim their ill-gotten wealth, got more votes than salonga. it was the saddest thing.
fast forward to 2016. it’s even more toxic now. the marcos son bongbong is running for VP under the banner of the nacionalista party that saw his dad elected president twice. the salonga son steve is running for governor of rizal but, no, not under the banner of the liberal party that saw his dad topping three senatorial races, rather, he is running for governor as an independent candidate because the liberal party cares more about compromising with local dynasties and trapos, what a shame. read Jovito Salonga’s son laments LP snub, steve’s story just before his first run for the same seat in 2013.
“Tuwid na daan may be true in the elective posts on the national level, but not on the local level,” he said.
Salonga was quick to say that he did not think President Aquino was aware of the compromises on the ground, but insisted that this was a reality he had to contend with in next month’s elections.
The “disturbing and aggressive alliances” with dynasties, warlords and traditional politicians began during the 2010 elections, he said.
Salonga said at that time, his father questioned such deals but got nowhere. He said that his father’s letters and phone calls were ignored. “He was very disappointed,” said the son.
when senator salonga lost the race for the presidency in ’92, i felt like i did when they killed ninoy in ’83. what a loss for nation. six years of a salonga presidency certainly would have taken the nation to a place vastly different from, and more desirable than, where we are now.
it’s great that he was also a prolific author — there should be a university course on good government using his books and journals as bibles — who also wrote his own speeches. this, from a speech he gave in UP in 1962 when he was rizal congressman and chairman of the committee on good government, resonates to this day, regardless of matuwid-na-daan. to this EDSA freak, it even seems like he already saw glimmers of people power at play.
DEMOCRACY, as one writer puts it, cannot be saved either by slander or by silence.
And in the Philippines, the word “silence” can never be over-emphasized for here, particularly in places where the high and the mighty have the run of things, the poor and the lowly are so afraid to give their evidence. Entire communities are terrorized into silence and prospective witnesses are rendered mute by the forces of physical violence. Hence, it is true to say we cannot clean up the mess in the world of crime and vice unless we are also willing to clean up the civic and political life of the community in which we live. And who is going to do that? Only we, the people. It is not merely the public officials. For as Bernard Shaw puts it very aptly— “Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”
We can’t have a good government and at the same time have a double standard of law observance. We can’t validly complain of corruption, if we are only too prepared and willing to bribe our way through to get what we want.
And so, if you ask me: how do we attain a higher standard of ethics in government? I answer:
The Philippine public has been treated to many erudite and well-reasoned treatises on how the Supreme Court (SC) should decide on Senator Grace Poe’s disqualification case. The legal issues are either involved and lengthy or simple and open-and-shut depending on who is making the case. Should the SC display judicial restraint, follow precedents, and hew closely to the letter of the law? Or should it display judicial activism and blaze a new judicial trail in pursuit of some perhaps new principle of jurisprudence? The SC did display a considerable capacity for judicial activism in allowing Juan Ponce Enrile to post bail though the charge against him is legally and constitutionally non-bailable. The new principle of jurisprudence, “humanitarian grounds,” which law students now have to learn has no accepted definition and one can drive an oil tanker through its portals. Be that as it may, not being a lawyer myself, I’d rather leave that to the legal eagles.
The purpose of this piece is not how the SC “should have decided” on the Poe case but what could be expected from revealed SC decision making in general.
Three theories on the decision making of the SC are salient and competing (see, e.g., Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall, 2011): (a) the legal theory — that what governs SC decision making are no more and no less than legal precedents and the Constitution; (b) the attitudinal theory — that what governs the SC decision making are the substantive prior preferences and ideologies of the justices; (c) the strategic theory — that SC decision making is governed by strategic considerations, especially in relation to outside forces, say, the other branches, especially elected branches of government. The President, the Senate, and Lower House have the power to retaliate (as, for example, through the budget allocation) in case of open display of contempt. Granting Juan Ponce Enrile the right to post bail on an unbailable charge clearly violates the legal theory. It may be understood as flowing from ingrained preferences (or biases as sometimes it is called) or from strategic considerations (or future payoffs as sometime it is called).
Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall (2011) tried to compare how these three theories perform as explanatory (proxied) variables in actual decisions of the US Supreme Court. Their logit regressions showed that none of the three theories can be rejected as correlates of SC decisions. I prefer to dwell on the strategic motives for decision making.
What appears to be a salient instance of strategic decision making by the US Supreme Court occurred during the New Deal Era. Then-US President Franklin D. Roosevelt — frustrated by repeated rebuffs by the US Supreme Court of New Deal legislations — threatened in 1937 to emasculate the SC with his Court Reorganization Plan. Known also as Roosevelt’s court packing plan, it came in the form of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937.
It sought to grant the President the power to appoint an additional justice of the Supreme Court for every member of the Supreme Court over the age of 70 and 6 months and up to a maximum of six new associate justices.
Since it was Congress — not the Constitution — that established the composition of the SC, it can recompose it. Soon after Roosevelt won a sweeping victory in November 1936, the SC decided 5-4 upholding a Washington minimum wage law which the New Deal (in keeping with the Keynesian view of putting purchasing power in the pockets of the poor) favored. The tie was broken by, of all people, Justice Owen Richards who had previously opposed New Deal legislations.
In 1938, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone opined in the US vs Carolene Products that the SC should show deference to the elected branches in matters involving economic policy though not in matters of civil rights and civil liberties. The SC seemed to have acted to ease the political pressure and protect its identity (exemplified by the court packing plan).
Although the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill never became law, the message seemed to have been heard loud and clear in the halls of the US SC. But that is the US SC. We are in the land of “only in the Philippines.”
The question is what strategic considerations bore on the SC’s decision on the Poe disqualification case? We may never know.
But consider that candidate Rodrigo R. Duterte has said he will cure every ill in three months. Although that is mostly campaign bluster, to accomplish within his term what he promises implies realistically that he becomes a dictator, which calls for a clash with — and eventual dismantling of — the Supreme Court.
If Poe was disqualified, it is likely that Duterte is the only alternative to Vice-President Jejomar C. Binay, Sr. whose own defense being “No court has found me guilty” fools nobody, let alone the SC justices. If Poe was not disqualified, she will likely win (she was still leading the polls as of March 6 despite the case hanging over her campaign) and the Supreme Court should feel safer in her hands than in either Duterte’s who will not stand judicial obstacle or Binay’s who will need to judicially extricate himself. That is one possible strategic motive bearing on the SC decision. There may be others.
And, of course, their own beliefs about the suitability of the candidates for president should be factored in. One thing is sure: Poe being allowed to run is nowhere near the judicial activism displayed in the doctrine of “humanitarian considerations.”
Raul V. Fabella the chairman of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis, a professor at the UP School of Economics, and a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology.
The Marcos spawn was germinated between despots and suckled on the teats of tyranny.
Hyperbole?
Impossible to overstate Martial Law and the cruelties it has visited on the country. Not the least, 30 years after the lupusman’s fall, his son the Bong can still deploy stolen wealth to hoodwink the gullible.
The fat purses for hacks and sycophants, the expensive operations of spin on the body politic, the studied pooh-poohing of outrage, the rewards for opportunists, the sustainability of corruption, the social acceptance of thieves, the subversion of democratic debate by incendiaries deliberately lobbed onto the platforms, the wholesale revision of history (the liberties taken with facts), the pillage of all sense of decency — this is still the aftermath of Martial Law; its continuing radioactivity.
So, too, is it MartialLawAfterlife, for the Bong to think we are all fools. It is a tenacious culture produced by Martial Law that will consign all Filipinos to the hell of Marcosian recuperation via the sheer power of money and a vast reservoir of callousness.
But the Bong is wrong to imagine he can have his way with us. He is wrong to think that 5-some years of paying for and cranking up sleek revisionist history targeting the youth will hand him an entire generation of zombies. He is wrong to think that my children, who are bright and passionate about the Philippines, are his to stand on en route to Malacanang. While true, the capital invested in his comms juggernaut has paid off in enough kids mouthing fairy tales about some weird 1972 – 1986 Camelot, I am certain that the computations of the Bong’s magicians are off. And my certitude is not based on wishful thinking.
The Bong is wrong, too, to think that Martial Law torture victims, grassroots orgs with 4 or 5 decade long histories, advocates of democratic process, and just-citizens, like myself, who have cultivated a refined sense of indignation, wield no political clout; can be taken out of the election math. The Bong’s campaign appears to be built entirely of cynical calculation, which cannot possibly account for the power of the right side of history.
It is also miscalculation to equate the failures of the Philippine presidents since 1986 to the horrors of Martial Law. This is disingenuousness on a monster scale: to foist on the citizenry a bizarre moral vacuum, where all error and success have similar therefore non-value. And he spices up this hogwash with the similarly spurious assertion that things have remained the same; have gotten worse; have made Martial Law, in hindsight, a bit of heaven on earth
The Bong miscalculates our capacity, as a people, to endure the indignity of spin. He thinks he can slather us in shit ideas like political and economic degeneration in the past 30 years; and slide on our carcasses onto Marcosian resurrection, He misjudges our minds, sharpened by 30 years of struggling to correct the damage wrought by Martial Law on our political, economic and cultural systems; and our hearts, made robust by 30 years of exercising people-powered democracy.
People power, I agree, has been diminished by its branding as a middle class conceit. People power, however, is a cultural and political truth bigger than the middle class abilities to articulate and grasp; and bigger than any presidency, Aquino’s included, can “harness.” The majority of Filipinos, no matter how poor, have a real taste and capacity for democratic action, and this proclivity has so developed in the last decades that authoritarianism is not an option. Merely catching a whiff of Martial Law odium around the dictator’s namesake is enough to trigger a recoil.
Neither is it viable, his snake-oll salesmanship of prosperity under the shadow of centralized governance. The vision will not move Filipinos, at this point in time, who have tasted the sweet success of their self-empowerment. Indeed the culture of self-empowerment that was born under the fatal threats imposed by Martial Law is now in the cusp of full maturity.
The Bong spits on our democratic achievements to try to restore shine to his name and slick-slide his clamber to the top. He has become the smooth operator he was honed to be within the incubator that was Martial Law. He is as much a Frankensteinian creature of that unlamented regime, as are all recent exercises of impunity, whomever were the perpetrators. They are all Marcosian children. But the Bong, in particular, in his inability to recognize the Philippines of today — a nation now built on the mantra of self-empowerment, a nation so comfortable with its decentralizing systems that it will be hard put to revert to autocracy — he exhibits his own lack of credentials for the job he seeks.
The Bong is wrong to think the Filipinos haven’t, in fact, moved on.